KEVIN MURPHY One square inch more or less
In
1955, the Quaker Oats Company launched the Klondike Big
Inch Land Co. promotion. Accompanying boxes of puffed cereal,
consumers received elaborate and apparently official deeds to one
square inch of land subdivided from a plot outside of Dawson City.
Capitalizing on romanticized notions of the North at the turn of the
century, the promotion was a tie-in to Quaker’s sponsored television
show Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and explicitly framed the titles
in the context of the Klondike Gold Rush. Slogans such as “Get
Free Gold Rush Land Today!” were wildly successful in capturing
children’s imaginations and encouraging cereal sales. 21 million deeds
were drawn up and rapidly claimed in a strange echo of the earlier rush.
More valuable than other cereal prizes, many of the deeds were saved
through the years. However, they were never intended to have real
property value. Quaker had considered the cost of so many land
transfers unfeasible, and none were ever registered. To make matters
worse, in 1965 the land was repossessed for non-payment of $37.20 in
taxes. Over the last 60 years, generations of deed holders who didn’t
read the fine print have contacted various administrative bodies,
only to be redirected to Quaker and subsequently disappointed. The
response from Quaker’s legal department was that, “the real value
of the deeds was based on the romantic appeal of being a property
owner in the Great Yukon Territory rather than on any intrinsic
value of a one-inch square of property.”1
Quoted in Arthur F. Marquette, Brands, Trademarks and Good Will: The Story of the Quaker Oats
Company (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967) 121.
1.
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